One Man's Notes on Movies and Other Life Obsessions by Chuck Wilson

November 28, 2017

The famously beautiful actress Hedy Lamarr set movie screens ablaze in the 1940s and ’50s, but what few knew was that her true calling was as an inventor: Credit Lamarr with the Wi-Fi technology bringing you this review. In this superb documentary, first-time filmmaker Alexandra Dean uses newly discovered audio tapes from a 1990 interview to let Lamarr — with valuable insight from historians, her children, and friends such as the late Robert Osborne — tell the amazing story of her life. Born in Austria, she shocked the world at age sixteen by appearing in a scandalous nudie pic called Ekstase (1933), which the pope denounced and Hitler banned. At eighteen, she married a munitions tycoon whose controlling ways (and ties to Mussolini and the Nazis) sent her fleeing to Paris, in an escape story so wild and inherently cinematic that it cries out to be dramatized.

Hollywood soon made her a star — Algiers and Samson and Delilahare among her best remembered films — but all along Lamarr was honing her skills as an amateur engineer. In an inspired stroke, Dean uses animation to show how Lamarr visualized the inner workings of every object such as player pianos and TV remotes, a way of seeing that helped her devise a frequency-hopping radio signal that would change the world. Recognition (and compensation) proved elusive in Lamarr’s lifetime, but in this marvelous documentary, a brilliant woman — “I’m a very simple, complicated person” — finally gets her due. (Chuck Wilson)

October 13, 2017

When same-sex marriage became legal in Finland this past March, the government celebrated by releasing an official emjoi — a leather-clad man with a drooping mustache and a police-style cap emblazoned with the word “Tom.” No explanation was necessary, for “Tom” was clearly a nod to Tom of Finland — real name Touko Laaksonen — the twentieth-century Finnish artist whose erotic art featuring hyper-masculine men in tight uniforms with bulging biceps and erect, comically enormous penises inspired repressed gay men the world over to embrace their own inner sex gods. In the admirably ambitious yet disappointing new film Tom of Finland, director Dome Karukoski and screenwriter Aleksi Bardy cover some forty-odd years in the life of Laaksonen (a superb Pekka Strang), a turn of time in which the artist goes from hiding his drawings behind an attic wall to seeing them become celebrated and then iconic, particularly in America.

It’s likely to surprise Tom of Finland fans that there’s so little explicit sex in this movie, but the choice, which certainly makes a slow movie even slower, feels true to the period, which was all about holding forbidden desires at bay. Born in 1920, Laaksonen learned early on to admire men furtively, and save his deepest feelings for the drawing page. During World War II, when the film begins, he becomes practiced in the art of the lingering glance, leading to clandestine liaisons in the woods with soldiers, a cruising-as-life stratagem he’ll deploy in civilian life as well, to good effect and bad. (A punch in the nose one day, an encounter with a future boyfriend the next.)

As he draws, Laaksonen flashes on men he was attracted to but didn’t dare approach, most of them laborers, briskly tailored military officers, and most specifically, a handsome Russian paratrooper (Siim Maaten) he knifed to death in the war. As the years pass, Laaksonen’s horrific memories of the killing evolve into waking fantasies that find the paratrooper alive and well and walking into the wildly sexualized tableaus the artist conjures from everyday life. While photographing a motorcycle club on a Helsinki street, Laaksonen grins as the Russian appears and begins grinding his body against the motorcyclists. The dead Russian has become Laaksonen’s ultimate man: muscles, leather, ready-to-fuck smile.

Such moments are potent, so why does Tom of Finland play like an over-cited term paper? The film is jammed with incident and detail but there’s little flow to the storytelling, and all too often, no clear sense of what year it is exactly or which soldier belongs to which army, much less why the filmmakers keep returning, again and again, to Laaksonen’s bigoted, dreary sister (Jessica Grabowsky). From beginning to end, she stops the movie in its tracks.

There’s a vibrant sequence in the home stretch that hints at the film that could have been. In the mid-1950s, Laaksonen’s longtime boyfriend (a moving Lauri Tilkanen) convinces him to send his art to America, and the Tom of Finland phenomenon begins. Two decades later, prior to the advent of AIDS, Laaksonen arrives in L.A.’s West Hollywood and is stunned to see something he helped create but surely never expected: a city brimming with loud, proud, happy homosexuals.

May 31, 2017

Bloody when it needs to be yet gentle at its core, writer-director Tommy Stovall's vampire flick, Aaron's Blood, is a triumph. The filmmaker's son, Trevor, plays Tate, a 12-year-old hemophiliac who lives in Sedona, Arizona, with his father, Aaron (James Martinez), both of whom are grieving the recent death of Tate's mother. The day after receiving a blood transfusion, Tate no longer needs glasses, lifts the school bully up by the neck and, that night, bites the jugular of a man who has broken into the house, draining him dry. Yep, Tate is becoming a vampire.

Determined to save his son, Aaron goes in search of the vampire who infected Tate -- only his (or her) blood can stop the boy's transformation — a process that leads to the first of several clever plot turns, many of which are downright goofy and yet, like so much of the movie, oddly believable. Martinez is very good, with Aaron responding to the increasing weirdness of his situation not with horror-flick hysteria but rather an achingly sweet humanity. Stovall (Hate Crime) doesn't have quite as much fun with the beheadings and the neck biting as he should, perhaps, but Aaron's Blood makes up in heart what it lacks in gory glee. (Chuck Wilson)

May 30, 2017

There will always be, it’s become clear, one more Winston Churchill story to tell: one more slant on a weekend, a summer, a year in the life of the twentieth century’s most formidable leader, a man whose history includes two world wars and speeches so glorious that future dramatizations were all but inevitable. But what happens when the story being told feels emotionally false and factually bogus? Churchill, a new drama starring the great Brian Cox, is so full of movie clichés and high melodrama that it’s sometimes hard not to giggle — and one should never laugh at the prime minister.

It is early summer, 1944. The Allies’ June 6 D-Day invasion of Normandy is days away, and Churchill is determined to stop it in its tracks. Standing on an English beach in the opening scene, the great man sees the sea foam turning red, just as the seas are said to have run red with the blood of soldiers during the disastrous Battle of Gallipoli, a World War I campaign that Churchill championed and that led to some 40,000 Allied deaths.

Determined not to make the same mistake twice, Churchill scoffs when presented the D-Day plans by General Dwight D. Eisenhower (John Slattery) and England’s Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (Julian Wadham), both of whom all but roll their eyes at the excitable prime minister. Conventional wisdom tells us these plans were years in the making, but the script — by first-time screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann, a young historian who also writes regularly about the truth-fudging in historical dramas — suggests that Churchill is seeing them for the first time. Alarmed at the idea of a potentially disastrous amphibious assault (as was Gallipoli), he orders his men to draw up plans for an Italian invasion, a command his staff, who treat the old boy like a doddering fool, ignores.

Movie critics are not historians (and shouldn’t pretend to be), but it’s hard not to doubt a film that depicts Churchill bad-mouthing the D-Day invasion three days out. And who knew that the prime minister’s wife (Miranda Richardson) felt so neglected in her marriage that, even with the invasion clock ticking, she packs her bags to leave? Or that she tried to slap Churchill to his senses? Or that it took a speech by a secretary (Ella Purnell) with a soldier fiancé to shame the clinically depressed leader into getting off his duff and doing his job?

And so it goes. The folks behind Churchill deserve the grief they’re destined to get from WWII purists, but the film has at least one memorable moment (maybe two, if you include the bit with the hat). At midpoint, King George VI (James Purefoy) shows up to decline in person Churchill’s invitation to witness the Normandy invasion from aboard a British warship. In real life, the king wrote the prime minister a letter (two letters, actually), but turning those words into a speech — beautifully delivered by Purefoy — is screenwriter fact-juggling at its most pleasing and most forgivable.

Cox’s delivery of Churchill’s “We will fight on the beaches” D-Day speech surely ranks among the best, but it’s a problem when a narrative feature’s most powerful scenes are drawn from historical text. Cox deserves better, but he nonetheless cuts an imposing figure — and an oddly soothing one as well. Maybe it’s just me, but even a doubt-filled leader is preferable to a soulless one, which may be why Churchill, flaws and all, could be just the tonic America needs as this long, nerve-jangling summer begins.

March 31, 2017

Life is in the details, and the remarkable yet frustrating eight-part miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan, of which four episodes have aired so far, is at its best when it captures the quiet textures of a given day: Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon), waking up at 5 a.m. on the first day of shooting for the horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), reaches in the dark for the single cigarette she left within arm’s reach as she turned out the light at bedtime. Across town, Davis’ co-star and lifelong rival, Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange), rubs fresh lemons over her elbows and arms before sleep — “Keeps my elbows supple” — and now greets the dawn (no alarm clock necessary for this star) by plunging her face into a sink full of witch hazel and ice cubes.

Of course, madness is rich with details, too, and so we see Crawford showing up on set that first day alongside her relentlessly loyal housekeeper, Mamacita (Jackie Hoffman), who’s brought along a handy-dandy basket of cleaning supplies. “Mamacita, let’s go to work,” Joan says after literally shuddering at the dingy dressing room, and though we don’t see it, you know those two will get down on their knees and scrub from top to bottom. For those who picture Faye Dunaway in their mind’s eye when they think of Joan Crawford, know that Feud creator and co-writer/director Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, The People v. O.J. Simpson), steers clear of Mommie Dearest, the 1978/1981 memoir and film that depicted Crawford as a raving loony who beat her adopted daughter after a slight so small as hanging a dress on a wire hanger.

Feud instead is self-consciously serious-minded, though little bits of humor delight. “I’m sorry, Miss Joan. She’s small, but she’s quick,” Mamacita says after gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Judy Davis) storms the house, angry that Joan has given an anti-Bette quote to her “mortal enemy,” gossip maven Louella Parsons. It’s funny too when Hedda threatens to run her long-written but never-published column, “Joan Crawford’s Early Tawdry Years,” but what Joan, Bette, or even worldly-wise Hedda never realize, suggests Feud, is that they’re being pitted against one another by studio chief Jack Warner (Stanley Tucci), as well as Baby Jane director Robert Aldrich (Alfred Molina), all in the name of advance publicity.

This is Feud’s central theme: Davis and Crawford may have treated co-workers, friends, lovers and family so abominably that they both died alone, but these stars were ultimately victims of a male-dominated Hollywood system that seeks, then and now, to not only keep women in their place, but to keep them from uniting together. While it’s great to see a TV show with something on its mind, what continually drags Feud down, besides an increased reliance on Aldrich’s career woes to pad out its hours, are scripts that become painfully didactic. By the time Feud lands on an attempt by Aldrich’s assistant, Pauline (Alison Wright), to persuade Crawford to star in a film based on a script that she wrote and also wants to direct, you’d be within your rights to check your watch and wonder what ever happened to Bette and Joan.

It need not be this way. In a superb scene in the third episode, written by Tim Minear and directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Bette and Joan go out to dinner. Joan shocks Bette by stating, quite matter-of-factly, that she lost her virginity at age 11. “Who was the lucky Cub Scout?” Bette asks, and Joan’s reply catches her further off guard: “My mother’s second husband, Henry Cassin. He was a lovely man. Meant the world to me. We called him ‘Daddy Cassin’ but he wasn’t really my daddy. We weren’t blood relations so it wasn’t incest. But he was kind and gentle, and he loved me. I led him into it.” The moment reverberates, as good screenwriting should, because we’ve already seen Crawford refer to MGM head Louis B. Mayer as “Daddy.”

If it sounds like this is a TV show about Joan Crawford rather than Bette Davis, that’s because Crawford, and by extension Jessica Lange, has the juicier material. It’s odd that the Davis scenes seem weak, since Murphy has touted the friendship he developed with the actress in her final years, but it’s also true that Davis went home alone at the end of each day’s shoot. Her daughter (Kiernan Shipka) has a small role in Baby Jane, but Davis soon drives her away, leaving no one for the great star to talk to, much less argue against. Such a life doesn’t lend itself to great episodic television.

Crawford still has Mamacita and, for a brief time, a husband (Reed Diamond) to emote against, but you can sense the writers struggling to find stories for Davis. Sarandon is never for an instant convincing as either Baby Jane (the makeup is far too light) or as Bette Davis the outsize personality, but she’s heartbreaking as Davis the woman, at home after work, smoking (always), drink in hand (always), staring alone into the night.

For me, Faye Dunaway, despite the monumental flaws of Mommie Dearest, still owns the role of Crawford — her inconsolable fury rings true, and Feud, perhaps, could use a bit more of it. But Langeis a wonder. All these years later, she remains our most exciting and most dangerous actress. In this way, she carries on the spirit of both Crawford and Davis, who kept audiences on pins and needles for decades. There’s a word for artists of such power: inimitable.

March 29, 2017

Brad (Anthony Rapp), 42, of Schenectady, New York, doesn't get any hits when he joins a gay dating site, but when he impulsively changes his locale to Jamaica, he's suddenly inundated with boyfriend offers from sexy young Jamaican men. Yenny (Jimmy Brooks), 23, actually shows his face, and in a blink, Brad and Yenny are texting, video chatting and masturbating together. All the while, Brad is telling lies -- he's not a financier, and he doesn't fly to Jamaica regularly on business.

In the emotionally intense Bwoy -- Jamaican patois for "boy"; "batty bwoy" is a gay slur -- writer-director John G. Young (Parallel Sons) has made a film that takes place almost entirely on Brad's computer and phone screens, and the inherent claustrophobia of that world is painfully familiar. Rapp is superb. Brad's need for connection is so deep and so desperate that it's impossible to judge him for his lies. Brooks, seen entirely from the other side of Brad's screen, is equally fine, creating a character we both doubt and long for Brad to save. "I'm not special," he says. "I'm one of millions. I wish I was special." Bwoy gets under your skin -- and may give pause to those who walk out of the theater and immediately click on their chosen hookup/dating app. (Chuck Wilson)

The need to tell a story and the desire not to collide in Live Cargo, the narratively uneven but visually exquisite debut feature from writer-director Logan Sandler. Shot on the island of Staniel Cay, in the Bahamas, this black-and-white drama centers on Nadine (Dree Hemingway) and Lewis (Lakeith Stanfield), whose newborn child dies as the film begins. Grief-stricken, they retreat to the island where Nadine spent much of her youth, and though Lewis clearly feels out of place, Nadine slips easily into the daily rhythms of the local fishing community. The well-acted Live Cargo, which also features Robert Wisdom and Sam Dillon, is at its best when it observes character acting silently against landscape, as when Nadine goes snorkeling and uses a spear gun to jab at sharks, a juxtaposition of natural beauty and human fury typical of Sandler's poetic approach.

The HD cinematography, by newcomer Daniella Nowitz, is magnificent. I won't soon forget the sight of Lewis walking down a dark road late at night with lightning suddenly igniting the horizon behind him. In the final act, Sandler and co-writer Thymaya Payne press hard on the plot, and a long sequence involving a stolen boat and Haitian refugees feels like a forced attempt at a thematic resolution for Nadine and Lewis. It doesn't ring true, but no matter — Sandler is a filmmaker to watch. (Chuck Wilson)

The lifelong friendship between French painter Paul Cézanne (Guillaume Gallienne) and novelist Émile Zola (Guillaume Canet) centers this beautifully produced but dramatically wobbly epic. As the film tells it, Cézanne rescued young Zola from schoolyard bullies in Provence in 1852, creating a brotherly bond that lasted until Zola used his friend as a model for the suicidal painter in his 1886 novel L'Œuvre (The Masterpiece). As this fictionalized account opens, an enraged Cézanne arrives at Zola's home, ready to do battle over the novel, prompting a dizzying series of flashbacks to the duo's three-decade friendship.

Writer-director Danièle Thompson loosely acknowledges the major events of the period, including the Dreyfus affair, and alludes to the titanic changes taking place in the world of art — Manet and Renoir are side characters — but this is not a film to use as a study source for your next college exam. The history here is personal, with enormous (and repetitive) attention given to Cézanne's precarious financial state and his romantic longing for Zola's wife, Alexandrine (Alice Pol). The film gains power in the final third, particularly when the selfish Cézanne is called to account by both Alexandrine and his own wife, Hortense (Déborah François), in speeches so potent one wishes Thompson had chosen to view the great artist's lives through the eyes of the women who loved (and tolerated) them. (Chuck Wilson)

January 10, 2017

Near the end of Underworld, the 2003 film that launched the popular (and profitable) horror franchise, Viktor (Bill Nighy), king of the vampires, tries to kill the werewolf (aka Lycan) lover of his protégé, Selene (Kate Beckinsale), and she is not pleased. Grabbing a sword, Selene leaps straight up and over Viktor, gently swiping his face with the sword as she passes. Glaring at her, he then takes a battle stance, his own blades drawn, but suddenly, puzzlement fills his eyes. There is a pause, and then the diagonal sword slice across Viktor’s face fills with blood and half his head — eyes still looking puzzled — oozes to the ground.

Viktor’s wittily gory demise, as directed by Len Wiseman, never grows old, which is both wonderful and sad because it turns out to be the single memorable moment from a film series that’s been around for 14 long years. The fifth entry, Underworld: Blood Wars, produced by Wiseman and directed by newcomer Anna Foerster, has received brutal reviews (fangs out!), but it’s actually not the worst thing ever — that would be 2012’s Underworld: Awakening, which happens to be the only other film in this series that Wiseman didn’t direct. Coincidence?

This time out, Selene and her vampire cohort, David (Theo James), are trying to prevent Marius (Tobias Menzies), a power-mad Lycan leader, and Semira (Lara Pulver), an equally ambitious vampire diva, from getting their teeth into Selene’s long-lost daughter, whose vamp/wolf mixed blood is the prize of prizes.

Devoted Underworld fans (and they are legion) will find heaps of new vampire/Lycan lore to parse, and the action is nonstop, though wildly inconsistent. Forester doesn’t seem to know what to do with a castle jammed with angry wolves and vamps; she's much better with Selene’s intimate final showdown with Marius. That fight takes place atop a snowy Nordic mountain near the Northern Lights, and the possibility that the setting was inspired by the animated hit Frozen is the only interesting thing about this movie.

Beyond the sight of Beckinsale slaying her enemies while clad in a black latex bodysuit, the ongoing appeal of the Underworld series surely lies in its villains, vampire and werewolf alike, and the absurdly overqualified British actors who play them. Besides the great Nighy, Stephen Rea, Charles Dance, Derek Jacobi and — most memorably, in three films now — Michael Sheen have brought a wicked glee to a series whose heroine (no offense) is serious to a fault.

For Marius, the evil Lycan leader of the newest film, Forester has enlisted Tobias Menzies, whom she directed in several episodes of the cable series Outlander. Wildly talented, Menzies should be just the spark to bring Underworld back to life, but it doesn’t happen. Screenwriter Cory Goodman (The Last Witch Hunter) isolates Marius from Selene and the other major players so that Menzies is left adrift, like a great fighter without a worthy sparring partner.

This series is listing, badly, which raises the question: Should Beckinsale hang up that latex suit? Although she’s always given her all to Selene, the Underworld flicks have felt like a fallback for the actress, who was long overdue for a great role. Last year, she finally found it, as the delightfully conniving Lady Susan in the sublime Jane Austen comedy Love & Friendship. Beckinsale is a revelation, not least because Lady Susan is everything Selene can never be: fully and vividly alive.

December 21, 2016

FENCES, which is playing in LA & NY, and opens nationwide December 25th is the movie I love most this year. I cry when I see it, not for the turns of plot (there are some good ones), but for the LANGUAGE, which is theatrical and exalted and magnificent. August Wilson wrote plays in which people speak the way we all wish we could speak---passionately, furiously, wittily, and with the twirled tongue of an accidental poet. (Each of us is an accidental poet maybe once a year, or every other year, or just once a decade, and when we do say something worth writing down---that stops speaker and listener in their tracks--we know it, instantly, and wish we were that person----that poet---everyday, and always.) So, yes, go see the space movie, and see LA LA LAND, cause those are the ones you'll be asked about, but see FENCES as soon as possible. See it, but mostly (and it's okay to briefly shut you eyes during a movie), LISTEN to it. (Chuck Wilson)